Detection of Alzheimers Disease from MRI using Convolutional Neural Networks, Exploring Transfer Learning And BellCNN

There is a need for automatic diagnosis of certain diseases from medical images that could help medical practitioners for further assessment towards treating the illness. Alzheimers disease is a good example of a disease that is often misdiagnosed. Alzheimers disease (Hear after referred to as AD), is caused by atrophy of certain brain regions and by brain cell death and is the leading cause of dementia and memory loss [1]. MRI scans reveal this information but atrophied regions are different for different individuals which makes the diagnosis a bit more trickier and often gets misdiagnosed [1, 13]. We believe that our approach to this particular problem would improve the assessment quality by pre-flagging the images which are more likely to have AD. We propose two solutions to this; one with transfer learning [9] and other by BellCNN [14], a custom made Convolutional Neural Network (Hear after referred to as CNN). Advantages and disadvantages of each approach will also be discussed in their respective sections. The dataset used for this project is provided by Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (Hear after referred to as OASIS) [2, 3, 4], which contains over 400 subjects, 100 of whom have mild to severe dementia. The dataset has labeled these subjects by two standards of diagnosis; MiniMental State Examination (Hear after referred to as MMSE) and Clinical Dementia Rating (Hear after referred to as CDR). These are some of the general tools and concepts which are prerequisites to our solution; CNN [5, 6], Neural Networks [10] (Hear after referred to as NN), Anaconda bundle for python, Regression, Tensorflow [7]. Keywords: Alzheimers Disease, Convolutional Neural Network, BellCNN, Image Recognition, Machine Learning, MRI, OASIS, Tensorflow